The truth shall make you free

In an editorial, the Globe and Mail says that “Last fall, it was one of the Liberal election campaign’s most prominent promises. To quote the platform: “We will end Canada’s combat mission in Iraq.” Simple, straightforward, clear … [but, just] … A year later, however, Canadian special operations soldiers are very much on the ground in Iraq. There are about 200 of them, a number that has roughly tripled since the Harper government. And those troops are clearly in combat – regularly shooting at and killing the enemy, and themselves being shot at – though Ottawa goes to great lengths to keep the details scarce. That is because the Trudeau government continues to maintain that the combat mission it expanded is actually the combat mission it ended. It’s Orwellian … There are good reasons for Canadian troops to be in Iraq,” the Globe and Mail goes on to say, but, “Last year, however, the Liberals made their arguments against a combat role. And then once in office, they promptly reversed the policy, without revising their reasoning … [and] … The problem is not the mission itself. It’s the government’s hypocrisy about the mission, and its extreme economy of information about what Canada’s soldiers are actually doing.” Being “economical with the truth” means, from Edmund Burke in the 1790s to the Spycatcher case in the 1980s, dissimulation, withholding the truth from those who are entitled to know it … and that’s exactly what Justin Trudeau, Stéphane Dion and Harjit Sajan are doing …

… keeping the truth away from Canadians who are entitled to know that their government casually tossed aside a promise and have committed Canadian troops to a real shooting war.

Major General Mike Rouleau, commander of Canada’s special forces was being careful to emphasize that his soldiers are operating within a defined mandate in a recent press conference, reported on by the Toronto Star, but he said, flat out that his troops “have engaged in a “substantial” number of engagements with Daesh fighters in recent weeks” ~ an engagement is milspeak for a battle … and a “substantial number” of battles is what? a church picnic? Of course not: battles are what happen when soldiers are in combat, fighting a war! It’s just the simple truth … but it’s gone “missing in action” in Liberal Ottawa.

It is time that the rest of the media, not just the Globe and Mail, calls out this government for hiding behind a smokescreen of platitudes even as it breaks one of it’s key election promises and sends Canadians soldiers into combat in Iraq.

The Laurentian Elites and the media were just tired of prime Minister Stephan Harper and all of his policies, they didn’t care if the polices were good for Canada and the world, they just hated Harper because he wasn’t one of them, and so they elected a Liberal government that has kept many, many of those good sound Conservative polices and programmes in place, from health care funding to combat in Iraq, but just dissembleslies about them.

We need, we deserve, we’ve earned more honest and just plain better leadership.